Sunday, August 20, 2017

We Are This Sensation That Keeps Happening

How
many people live in your heart? I have a population of two million. My back
hurts. I’m stuck in this position until my mind spreads its wings and I leave
the earth and remember the power of my grandfather’s coffee. Most of my
narratives include at least one accordion but this time I’m going to insert a
slice of cherry pie and the dream of a silver moon. We are this sensation that
keeps happening, you and I, because we’re alive and that’s what happens when
you’re alive, you grow a periscope or you don’t, and I mean that in its most
metaphorical sense. I like to explain how things work but this time I’m just
going to back away and let things happen on their own. Think of this as water
running through a hose. The house of language is spinning through space. I’m
immersed in language and pushing these words toward you. Why? Because I visited
Great Falls, Montana, once. I mean, what exactly goes on the life of an oyster
anyway?

These
are my experiments in dirt. No, the locomotive isn’t an oval, but it is symbolic.
I put it here for the details, which are combustible, and brassy as a T-shirt.

The
river is full of counsel. We should listen to the water. It seems to know what
it’s doing. Water is like that. So transparent, so full of currents and fish. Even
the ocean is a dead giveaway. The groupers are choirs and the angelfish hum. Life
is a journey. Or so they say. The ghost of a pig, for example. Or boats. There
is a sky at the bottom of the ocean. It is made of churchyards and clouds. One
day it will rise to the surface and I will feed it my wounds. How do you weigh the world? I blow on my fingers and
wait for the sun to rise in my thumb.

I’m
concerned with the camels. Arthur Rimbaud keeps piling goods on their backs.
It’s a long way across the Danakil Desert. The horizon resembles a rugged
knife. The salt has the weight of an archaic stamp.

But
that was another lifetime ago, before the Beatles or Allen Ginsberg. Today the
goats are helping the carpenter of the sky build a beautiful waterfall. This
will achieve the humidity of a cardiovascular tomahawk as fleshy folds of
indignity boil in the vigilante’s violin.

The
air gets cool and dimples the intervals like vespers in a Yorkshire gym. I see
no chicken whose shape in chocolate would circumscribe my guests. Ergo, I
forego the lanolin, and prepare for transit.

Independent
portholes chronicle the passage of Greenland.

I
love my desk. Did I mention cranberry? Colors burst out of me. Some of them are
charming and some of them are bitter as wormwood, or the chancellors of
Germany. These colors drift quietly to the floor and become fairy tales in
which the marsh tells tales of thorny sprawl. Colors are just the humors of an
icy whippoorwill. There will be more when the kneecaps arrive with their
lambent taxis and vegetable hats. Nothing is insentient, not even TV
evangelists. Everything grins on the subatomic level. The recitals are sluttish
but the diseases are memorable.

The
world itself is a fabrication, so why not the crunch of gravel beneath your
feet? There are circumstances in which a panacea of light strikes the lake with
its ribbons of gold and I can hear the smell of the ceiling and it’s a balm to
the axle of my nerves. This is called reflection, and is welcome to the
portfolio of life.

Are
you aware right now of what’s happening? The mailbox antenna speeds into the
sponge of the future spinning strands of the past.

This
search isn’t over. There is a bubbly autonomy to these words as they percolate
through consciousness.

About Me

John Olson is the author of Backscatter: New And Selected Poems, from Black Widow Press, Souls Of Wind, a novel about the notorious French poet Arthur Rimbaud in the American West, from Quale Press, and The Nothing That Is, an autobiographical novel from Ravenna Press. Larynx Galaxy, a collection of essays and prose poetry, appeared in June, 2012, from Black Widow Press. The Seeing Machine , a novel about French painter Georges Braque, appeared from Quale Press in fall 2012.